Bookpost #6

 

I know, #5 was only like four posts ago, but it's been many months in the interim! Thankfully, my drive to read is not as repressible by bad moods as my drive to write.

 

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Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)

I think this is one of those things that, like a lot of Silver Age science fiction, you have to read as a kid to really love. Having encountered a bunch of its ideas filtered through all manner of improbable other channels (e.g., the novelizations of the Doom games—which I absolutely adored as a kid—riffed on the whole “aliens that look like demons from Christian mythology” thing), and being about seven decades too late for any of its ideas to seem forward-thinking, I can't say I thought highly of it. Sexist as a matter of course, trying hard to be racially progressive but stepping on every conceptual and linguistic rake imaginable (including the n-word over and over again), and too didactic to have much in the way of compelling plot. Cool ideas but fairly lifeless execution. A classic museum piece.

Platform Decay (Martha Wells)

It's Murderbot! We love Murderbot, don't we? My assessment of System Collapse still stands, more or less (“All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!”) but this one, thanks to an interesting setting and a few gripping action scenes, actually stands out more in my memory than the couple that preceded it. Lots of grist for the Mothership module mill here. The humor is wearing a little thin, though.

Uprooted (Naomi Novak)

One of my best friends gave me Spinning Silver as a gift a while back, expressing regret that she hadn't been able to find a copy of Uprooted, which she liked better. And I've talked to at least two other people since who made the same assessment: Oh, you liked Spinning Silver? You gotta read Uprooted! It's even better! Well, I finally did, and reader, I did not like Uprooted nearly as much as Spinning Silver. It was enjoyable, certainly, and the first act is a clever twist on a bunch of hoary old wizard-school tropes (although the enemies-to-lovers stuff could hardly be hoarier or more bluntly telegraphed), but I thought it outstayed its welcome a bit—one grueling battle or other ordeal after another after another only to arrive at exactly the conclusion we expected all along. It did make me want to write more Cairn stuff, though, so that's a win.

The Correspondent (Virginia Evans)

Read this in order to make an informed guest appearance at the same friend's bookclub while visiting her. Found it not only to be pretty good, generally speaking, but oddly resonant with my own life; in some ways, the protagonist is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God version of my mom (my mom is great, for the record; the grace of God is powerful stuff). Evans does an excellent job of giving her a voice that remains consistent and recognizable even as she code-switches widely across different media and different correspondents. A believably and reliably unreliable narrator.

Antarctica (Claire Keegan)

Borrowed this from my dad on a camping trip after he'd finished it, thinking I'd never read any Keegan. Kept surprising myself by realizing “Oh, I've read this before” and dimly remembering what came next—turns out I'd previously read at least six of the 15 stories in here. The narrative structures are sometimes a bit conventional, building methodically to a climactic moment of horror or catharsis, but the prose is wonderful, and her ability to conjure rural Ireland and the American South alike is striking. “Ride If You Dare” is my hands-down favorite.

Late Fame (Arthur Schnitzler)

Pretty lightweight, but enjoyable and evocative. Unsparing of its characters (and the tendencies of theirs you will surely recognize in yourself and people you know), but warm and good-hearted on the whole. I'm curious to see the serendipitously recent film adaptation starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee, both of whom I love.

The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai)

Squarely part of the weird, uncomfortable little micro-genre in which straight women write relentlessly bleak, borderline cruel tragedy porn about doomed gay men. Credit where it's due, though, she's a great writer. Strong characters, a compelling story (or set of interlinked stories), a wonderful not entirely nostalgic vision of 1980s Chicago.

Orbital (Samantha Harvey)

Insubstantial but charming and beautifully written. Lovely descriptions of the station, of Earth from orbit, of the inner lives of the astronauts, of the fragility and impermanence of everything we know and care about.

The Cactus League (Emily Nemens)

Oddly gets a bunch of little things wrong about baseball, and doesn't really go anywhere narratively or thematically in the end, but features distinct, well drawn characters, some of whose little lives are tremendously moving.

The New York Game (Kevin Baker)

Baker is kind of an annoying old-school crank when it comes to baseball stats and strategy (the word “ribbies” appears repeatedly, God help us) but the New York history is delightful and hey, he is writing about ancient history, after all, as baseball history goes. A bottomless well of fun trivia.

Trouble and Her Friends (Melissa Scott)

In the same used-books section of the senior center shop in Hot Springs, Montana, where I scored the whole History of the Runestaff series and a bunch of Andre Norton novels for two bits a pop, I grabbed a couple of Melissa Scott hardcovers (for the relatively princely sum of $1.25 each). Was just flipping through things, reading the first couple paragraphs of each book to see if the prose was any good, liked the cyberpunk cover design of this one, enjoyed the first page, picked up another of Scott's (see below), thought the first page of that one was pretty solid too, bought them both. A whole year later, I finally got around to reading them. And they're really good! This starts out feeling, as a lot of early-90s SF novels do, like a relic, extraordinarily conservative in some of its predictions of the future a century hence, wildly over-optimistic about others. It just gets better and better as it goes, though, with strong characters and a keen eye for the social and political dimensions of the technology Scott is interested in (even if the technical dimensions are now quite dated). She has a wonderful yen for giving everybody and everything unusual, improbable names.

Dreamships (Melissa Scott)

Like Trouble, this features a mostly queer cast of characters; unlike Trouble, here Scott has confidence enough to imagine a future in which being gay or bisexual is so normal that it goes entirely unremarked on. Readers who are not old enough to remember the 1990s probably cannot fully appreciate how optimistic and visionary this was back in 1992, but it warms the heart. This one is a fun blend of cyberpunk and planetary romance, and again combines some rather dated ideas about future technology's physical form and capabilities with some really sharp, prescient ones about the social, political, and economic aspects of advanced computing and networking. The ethnic jumble of the setting being substantially Chinese and American made me think, naturally, of Firefly, and wonder whether that show's creators had read this. And, in silly Firefly-related news, I recently watched Flowers of Shanghai—I've been on a huge Tony Leung kick—and its score finally jolted me into realizing, 25 years late, that the Firefly score is an erhu-heavy mashup of American Western music with Chinese classical. Which, for all the show's heinous flaws, including its abject failure to ever live up to the promise of the setting (or feature Asian actors), is pretty neat.

Bookpost #5

Yes, it's (past) that time again. And again, we're just going to skip over the stuff I don't have anything positive to say about. Being catty and trashing other people's work may be fun, but it's not nice. Life is short. We're all trying our best.

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Tokyo Ueno Station (Miri Yu)

Beautiful and oddly lively, for all that it's a profoundly sad novel about a dead homeless guy and the crushing weight of class and caste in Japanese society. I find it really interesting how much contemporary(-ish) Japanese art, like the films of Juzo Itami and Satoshi Kon, prominently features, or even (as in this novel and Kon's Tokyo Godfathers) focuses directly on the homeless, a population that, by official measures, scarcely exists in the country.

HHhH (Laurent Binet)

A fascinating blend of gripping true story and dizzying metafiction account of trying to write a gripping true story. Not as confident as Binet's Civilizations, which I read first, and less enjoyable overall, but the lack of confidence is part of the point, and how much are you supposed to enjoy learning about the rise of the Nazis and how they strangled the life out of Europe, even if a few of them do get theirs in the end?

Severance (Ling Ma)

For all that this was prescient about what a disastrous pandemic originating from China would look like (Ma predicted the ubiquity of KN95 masks and remote work, among other things, well before COVID arrived), I think it's been unfairly pigeonholed as “a pandemic novel,” when it's really much more about The Way We Life Now. The real pandemic was capitalism! (But seriously, a beautiful, provocative, hilariously funny novel, one of the best I've read in recent years.)

Short Letter, Long Farewell (Peter Handke)

A weird, endlessly digressive little novel that I didn't tremendously enjoy as I was reading it, but that has stuck with me more than I expected it to. Handke had a way of conjuring up powerfully vivid little scenes and communicating the disjointed, discursive thinking of his oddball narrator (which is to say, probably, himself) such that you can really get into the head of a guy you have very little reason to relate to.

Plague Ship, Ordeal in Otherwhere, and Garan the Eternal (Andre Norton)

Found these last summer in the same used-books section where I snapped up Moorcock's Runestaff books—same yellow and yellowing little old 1970s paperbacks (somebody in Hot Springs, Montana, was plugged into exactly the same influences as Gygax and company). I'd never read any Norton, one of the most prolific SFF authors of the 20th century and, right alongside Moorcock, one of the chief influences on D&D (and thus on pretty much all genre media of the past 50 years). I grabbed one from the '50s, one from the '60s, and one that was started in the '40s and finished in the '70s, and they're all delightfully representative of their time periods, going from the hypermasculine star-trader heroics of Plague Ship (which is basically just a short Traveller campaign) to the psychedelic quasi-feminist zaniness of Ordeal in Otherwhere and then Garan lurching from baroque Sky Captain silliness in his postwar debut to apocalyptic drear (and also trippy past-lives Eternal Champion stuff) in the Nixon-era conclusion. Definitely going to be on the lookout for more Norton in my used-books beachcombing.

Creative Surgery (Clelia Farris)

I was put onto Farris by Lavie Tidhar, who included her story “The Substance of Ideas” in Best of World SF: Volume 2. For better and worse, I think he chose well — that story, which is included in this collection, remains my favorite. They're mostly great, though (I also liked “Gabola” and “Secret Enemy” quite a bit), and every single one has something arrestingly memorable going on.

Fire to Fire (Mark Doty)

Another book, albeit an almost entirely different one, where my point of entry (in this case, “Messiah: Christmas Portions”) remains my favorite of the author's work, but I'm not the least bit disappointed. Many beautiful poems here; Doty is an observer of the minutiae of life, particularly urban life, with few equals. Love “Chanteuse,” and not just because it's about, and so vividly evokes, Boston.

Broken Stars (ed. Ken Liu)

Another one that I found my way to via Tidhar's Best of World SF series, and as much as anything I've tracked down following the spoor of one of those stories, this reinforces my belief that all the best, most interesting stuff happening in SFF is happening outside the United States, if not outside the Anglosphere entirely (although, in fairness, a couple of these were originally written in English). “Moonlight,” “The Snow of Jinyang,” and “The First Emperor's Games” are all fun little confections, playing with genre tropes or mashing up short fiction with other media (“Moonlight” is by Cixin Liu; I was not a fan of The Three-Body Problem, but I think his style is very well suited to this sort of wry short fiction). The best of the book, and one of the most affecting, thought-provoking stories I've read in a long time, is “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appeal,” which like many (most?) of the works in this collection concerns travel through time and our perception thereof.

Delicious in Dungeon, Vols. 1–4 (Ryoko Kui)

Super fun stuff, can't wait to read more. Incredibly good about taking a lot of what's weird and irrational about D&D and digging into it, spinning out rationales for it and deriving all kinds of fun little plots from it. The whole dungeon ecosystem is a great idea, but all the individual parts of it are particularly wonderful fuel for game writing.

The Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd)

Strange and beautiful. Some of the best work I've ever read not so much about nature but about being in nature, being embodied in the natural environment—the sensory experience, and not just the sights and sounds (although she has keen and unusual observations about how the mountain atmosphere plays tricks on the eyes) but the touch and taste of it too, the sensations of walking barefoot, napping under the sky, drinking spring water straight from the creek. Also a good reminder that you might write something truly great and not be able to find a publisher for it, not be able to find an audience for it, and that doesn't diminish its greatness. Shepherd had the pleasure of seeing it published (and become beloved and influential) late in life, after it'd sat in a desk drawer for 30 years. Not all artists are so lucky!

The Vanished Birds (Simon Jimenez)

Didn't love the story or setting, but still found a lot to like. Strong, well drawn characters, some arresting imagery, good writing throughout. The first shift of perspective is extremely powerful, a wonderfully lived-in illustration of the effects of time dilation, of what it's like to live, travel, and love in an interstellar society. The second shift in perspective, and the subsequent elaboration of one character's backstory, is much weaker, and the novel never finds it way back to the heights of the first two chapters.

Radical Warrior: August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General (David Dixon)

It's not perfect (like almost everything published these days, it could've really used more and better editing) but I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth when the universe hands me a full-length biography of my favorite, and heretofore criminally obscure, Civil War general. The full story of Willich's life is even more delightful than what I knew from Wikipedia and anecdotal scraps from other histories. A truly modern man, two centuries ahead of his life, and deeply flawed in ways that only make him more relatable to me. It is crazy what posters dudes like Willich, Marx, and Engels were. People joke about like, “Oh, imagine if they'd had Twitter!” but no, I don't think that would've actually changed much. They were tweeting at each other in the broadsheets and in handbills, and exactly the same dumbass ways leftist bros snipe at each other online today, right down to accusing each other of being both gay and cucked. It's magnificent. And also, for all that he was a temperamental egotist with a death wish, for as much as he enjoyed the sound of his own voice and was a political naïf, Willich was truly heroic. Not just a brilliant, and appallingly physically courageous, military officer, but a courageous thinker, a courageous ally to oppressed and marginalized people (particularly Black Americans), and somebody who sought—for all that he enjoyed fame, acclaim, and the perks of leadership—not to command but to empower others, to give them the tools to defend and perfect a people's republic.

Bookpost #4

Ah, I've been negligent.

It's been a fallow season for me, TTRPG-wise; I've been going through some drama in my personal life, and my long-running Stars Without Number game has gone on a “hiatus” that will probably prove to be permanent. I had a falling out with one of the players, and nearly all of the others have gone through something major of their own in the past couple months (two had deaths in the family; two are about to have their first kid). Most of the group continues to meet, but sporadically now, and often with only two or three players. We've been trying out Black Sword Hack, which is delightful and great for some drop-in, drop-out adventure-of-the-week action, but after literally years of getting six people together every week, almost without fail, seeing the game come to this is tough. And missing my best, most enthusiastic player—who was one of my closest friends, too—is tougher still.

But life goes on. I'm not doing much TTRPG stuff, but I'm writing poetry and fiction, I'm drawing, I'm playing board games, I'm cooking. And I'm reading a lot! And I haven't done a post about books since January! So now there's way too damn much to go into detail, and I'm skipping over a bunch of things I didn't like or don't have much to say about. But the highlights:

Convergence Problems (Wole Talabi)

The last thing I mentioned in the previous post was, reasonably enough, the first thing I read this year. And it was great! The quality of the stories is a bit uneven, but the best are fantastic, and even the weaker ones are different enough from what's popular in American SF, and offer enough insight into Nigerian society and culture, to be fascinating.

How Not to Network a Nation (Benjamin Peters)

If/Then (Jill Lepore)

Two different 1960s-centric nonfiction stories about the technological futures we didn't have. Lepore is a much, much better writer than Peters (no offense, Ben), and her book infinitely more readable, but the subject matter of How Not to… is, to me, much more interesting. Kinda wish Lepore would write about it!

All for Nothing (Walter Kempowski)

Old Filth (Jane Gardam)

Two great literary novels about some of the darkest corners of 20th-century history that are way, way funnier than they have any right to be.

Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen (Garth Nix)

History of the Runestaff (Michael Moorcock)

The Languages of Pao (Jack Vance)

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

A bunch of “Can you believe I'd never read this before?” SFF classics. (Okay, maybe Pao specifically isn't exactly a classic, but it's the first Jack Vance I'd ever read, so that's something.) Love a lot of the worldbuilding detail in Nix's work, particularly the musical magic. Love how clear it is that OD&D was just “let's turn the Runestaff books into a game.” Love a good old SF take on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, Vance's vocabulary, and his eye for environmental detail (his characters leave a lot to be desired, though). Absolutely adore the over-the-top, overstuffed space opera plenitude of Vinge's Zones of Thought setting.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Stanislaw Lem)

The Two of Them (Joanna Russ)

Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin)

A bunch of new-to-me works by beloved favorites. Memoirs isn't the most gripping narrative, but it's a fascinating perspective on American Cold War paranoia from an outside perspective. The Two of Them is vivid, incredibly well drawn, and repeatedly heartbreaking. And both of the Le Guin books, well, shame on me for not having read two of the best works by my all-time favorite author earlier. Five Ways is gorgeous, incredibly moving, far more romantic than you'd expect from her. Always Coming Home is just astounding. A whole world, a whole philosophy, a whole way of living.

Empire of Pain (Patrick Radden Keefe)

Yeah, it really is that good. And they really were that bad.

Godwin (Joseph O'Neill)

Funny, strange, thought-provoking. Wonderful characters; the degree to which the narrators are utterly distinct and different from one another and both absolutely believable is real virtuoso writing.

Total Chaos (Jean-Claude Izzo)

A fun, pacy, trope-heavy crime novel that is so thick with culturally, geographically, chronologically specific detail that it's easy to forgive the many predictable beats.

You Dreamed of Empires (Alvaro Enrigue)

Best thing I've read all year. One of the most memorable, strange, immersive, exciting novels I've read in quite a few years, in fact.

Bookpost #3

Illustration by Reiko Murakami for "The Worldless," from Lightspeed

 

As I finish off my reviews of last year's reading, I'm breaking things into groups, both because they happen to be neatly divisible according to little themes and because three of them are short-story collections and two-thirds of this post will be me yammering about all those stories in one big jumble.

The Incal (Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud)

The Colossus (Sylvia Plath)

Bright Dead Things (Ada Limón)

One comic book and two poetry collections that I've read before and return to for comfort or inspiration. The Incal is usually more appealing for the astounding Moebius art than the Looney Tunes plot half cribbed from Dune, but I actually found myself appreciating the latter this time. I've bought a couple tarot decks since I last reread the book, and knowing a little about the tarot and the Fool's Journey made the story a lot richer and the seemingly one-dimensional characters legible as archetypes and signposts along John's path.

As for poetry, well, I'm a sap and a basic bitch. I love “The Conditional,” I don't care what anybody says. “State Bird,” “Drift,” “Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America”—lots of great Limón, and if a bunch of them are schmaltzy and sentimental and extra, well, we all deserve to be a little schmaltzy and sentimental and extra sometimes. Plath, of course, was a colossus herself, and this is some of her best work: “Night Shift,” “The Eye-mote,” “Departure,” “The Bull of Bendylaw,” “Mushrooms,” “A Winter Ship.” Some of these lines and fragments will rattle around my head every day as long as I live. “Blameless as daylight I stood looking…”

 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

The Empusium (Olga Tokarczuk)

Two short novels, new to me, by authors I know and love. One old, one new, both excellent. Both creepy, mysterious fun, and both told by memorably weird (but heartrendingly believable) unreliable narrators. Secrets, sinister rural locals, haunted places. Read them both, and if you haven't read The Magic Mountain, don't let that stop you from enjoying The Empusium; there are some little jokes and riffs and references you'll miss, but nothing essential. (But do read The Magic Mountain, too.)

 

Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer)

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

Two chunky contemporary science fiction novels that Reddit loves but I don't. (Lesson learned: Don't get SF book recs from Reddit.)

Palmer and Watts are both obviously brilliant people, and there's a lot to like in these books (especially the alien life Watts imagines), but I don't believe either of them understands human beings very well (I know Watts, with all his enthusiasm for evolutionary psychology, doesn't). The dialogue in both is unnatural beyond bearing; the characters are difficult to differentiate from one another except by their stations and the trappings thereof. (And the narrators, in stark contract to Jackson's and Tokarczuk's, are unreliable in a showy, overwrought, unconvincing way.)

Both novels feature impossibly gifted people doing inconceivably consequential things, which has been done to death in SF for at least a century now. Watts at least has the excuse of having his cast be the crew of a spaceship far from Earth, whereas Palmer's narrative takes place on Earth among billions and yet is driven, in nearly every respect down to the smallest details, by the actions of a dozen or so John Galts. Spare me! Let me read about regular people doing regular human things, please!

Setting aside the tedious Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand of it all, and in spite of the authors' evident intellectual gifts, both novels revolve around unsatisfying ideas. The thesis Watts presents in Blindsight (that consciousness is maladaptive, an evolutionary dead end that makes humans unfit for survival) is silly, and the evidence he invents to support it—in the striking absence of any at all in the real world—is sillier. If Palmer has a thesis beyond “the Enlightenment was cool and important,” I don't have the patience to slog through three sequels and find out what it is (which also means I may never know whether the characters' unseemly obsession with race and gender in an ostensibly post-racial, post-gender world served some later narrative purpose).

 

Never Whistle at Night (eds. Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.)

The Best of World SF: Volume 2 and The Best of World SF: Volume 3 (ed. Lavie Tidhar)

My disappointment with The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 did not deter me: I finished the year with a whole lot more short genre fiction. And a lot of it was great, and refreshingly different from what I'm used to! (I've linked below to those stories first published in online magazines; holler if you see any I missed that are freely available.)

North American SF authors are, and have for a long time now been, preoccupied with dystopian and post-apocalyptic themes—climate disaster, totalitarianism, a creeping anti-Enlightenment. Those are entirely sensible things for North Americans (and everybody else) to be worried about, but it does sometimes feel like we're going in circles, retracing our steps in the paths laid down by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others decades ago. (On the other hand, Palmer and Watts are, if not exactly Pollyannas, certainly techno-optimists in a material sense—both of the above-panned novels feature societies that have arrested, or at least adapted to, climate change and that represent at least somebody's idea of utopia—and look how far that got them with me. You just can't win.)

Colonialism casts a long shadow over these stories, nearly all of them told by writers from outside what used to be called “the First World” or by Indigenous authors in the United States and Canada. They're thinking about the history of colonialism, its legacy, the scars it left behind, and the new forms it has taken and threatens to take. Many of them are thinking about the climate, too, but in ways contingent on colonial history. Where many First World fictions imagine a universal apocalypse or near-apocalypse—a world in which every human, or nearly even human, dies, and where every existing society is overthrown (and we do get a bit of that here, as in the charming “Old People’s Folly” by Austrian author Nora Schinnerl, one of the few Western Europeans in either volume; not to pick on Schinnerl, but it's tempting to read in the Western preoccupation with universal apocalypse an inability to imagine a future in which Western hegemony is displaced)—a lot of writers from once-colonized places see in the crisis “merely” a worsening of what's already bad, a noose tightening around the Global South and the most vulnerable in the “developed” world. Climate disaster means privation, war, hunger, migration, dispossession, displacement. These themes dominate the volumes edited by Tidhar, interspersed or overlapping with the theme that dominates Never Whistle at Night: reckoning with genocide and cultural vandalism. Resentment, desire for revenge, regret and yearning for traditions forgotten or effaced, and hope for cultural renewal are especially evident here among the work of Native American, African, and Southeast Asian writers.

There are also just a lot of fun, inventive genre ideas in these volumes. “The Substance of Ideas” by Clelia Farris (translated by Rachel S. Cordasco) in World SF Vol. 2 and “Catching the K Beast” by Chen Qian (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan), “Two Moons” by Elena Pavlova (translated by Kalin M. Nenov and Elena Pavlova), and “Symbiosis Theory” by Choyeop Kim (translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort) in Vol. 3 all have wonderfully weird alien life. “Salvaging Gods” by Jacques Barcia, “The Clay Child” by Dilman Dila, and “Between the Firmaments” by Neon Yang in Vol 2.; “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings” by Daniela Tomova, “Act of Faith” by Fadzlishah Johanabas, “My Country is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou, and “Ootheca” by Mário de Seabra Coelho in Vol. 3; and “Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” by Kate Hart and “Eulogy of a Brother, Resurrected” by Carson Faust in Never Whistle treat divinity and spirituality in various interesting ways (some touching, some thought-provoking, some unsettling). “The Regression Test” by Wole Talabi, in Vol. 2, is one of the best stories about AI I've read in a long time—and God knows I've read a lot of them.

“The Farctory” by K.A. Teryna (translated by Alex Shvartsman) in Vol. 2; “The Worldless” by Indrapramit Das and “Echoes of a Broken Mind” by Christine Lucas, in Vol. 3, and “Capgras” by Tommy Orange in Never Whistle are, I think, the very best of the bunch. Also memorable or powerful or just plain fun: “At Desk 9501” by Frances Ogamba, “Dead Man, Awake, Sing to the Sun!” by Pan Haitian (translated by Joel Martinsen), and “Waking Nydra” by Samit Basu in Vol. 2; “The Foodie Federation’s Dinosaur Farm” by Luo Longxiang (translated by Andy Dudak), “I Call Upon the Night as Witness” by Zahra Mukhi, and “Where the Trains Turn” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (translated by Liisa Rantalaiho) in Vol. 3; and “Navajos Don't Wear Elk Teeth” by Conley Lyons and “Heart-Shaped Box” by Kelli Jo Ford in Never Whistle. And I should give a special shout to the aforementioned “Old People’s Folly” by Nora Schimmerl and “Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau in Never Whistle, both of which I believe were debut stories, and both of which are impressive.

These books aren't perfect—there are some clunkers in all three, particularly in Never Whistle, and all three are plagued (as it seems everything is these days, when editors don't edit and proofreaders have all been fired) by typos. I'm definitely richer for having read them, though. I picked up a few things that are going to go straight into my SWN campaign, and I've got a long list of authors whose work I'll be looking out for. I've already picked up (and am greatly enjoying) Wole Talabi's Convergence Problems!

Bookpost #2

Something else I’m way behind on: cataloging and reviewing my reading this year. Here’s a partial account.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (Jonathan Katz)

I knew some parts of Smedley Butler’s biography (like the Business Plot, of course), and I knew of the U.S. role in the establishment of banana republics favorable to business all over Latin America (thanks in no small part to Stephen Kinzer’s excellent The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire), but I never knew the extent to which Butler was the Forrest Gump of imperial warmongering. Some of these episodes—the Marines holding the Haitian legislature at gunpoint and forcing them to essentially sign away their sovereignty; Congress engineering Panama’s secession from Colombia at the behest of American banks—are so sordid and cartoonishly evil you’d scarcely believe them in fiction.

The Other Wind (Ursula Le Guin)

Like some of the short stories, I’d never read this one before. I think I was at just the wrong age for it when it was published—too old for kids’ fantasy books, in my teenage mind—and then I simply didn’t pick it up as an adult, for whatever reason. I wonder what I would have made it at age 17 or 25; now, on the heels of rereading The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, I found it surprisingly hopeful and youthful in spirit. A beautiful conclusion to the Earthsea saga.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

For a guy who loves Neuromancer as much as I do, I really haven’t read enough of Gibson’s later work. Or maybe I have, because I didn’t love this. Aseptic and lifeless, clever but purposeless. Not nearly as prescient as it was, I gather, hailed for being at the time.

They Will Dream in the Garden (Gabriela Damien Miravete)

I asked a friend for some obscure SFF in translation for a book swap, and she delivered. Short stories, some science fiction, some fantasy, some horror, some hybrids, almost all excellent. “The Synchrony of Touch” and “The End of the Party” were my particular favorites, the former for its elegiac strangeness, the latter for making a hoary old theme fresh and new.

Bliss Montage (Ling Ma)

Another gift from a friend, more genre-bending short stories, another big hit. Here, the hilarious and the surreal keep melting, or crashing, into the deadly serious and the all too real. Lots of troubled, or troubling, relationships; domestic violence features in several stories (including the excellent, and very funny, “Los Angeles”) and haunts others. “Office Hours” is particularly good, a challenging, uneasy, fascinating blend of the cozy and the sinister.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (eds. R.F. Kuang and John Joseph Adams)

Having read and enjoyed a bunch of short genre fiction, I thought back on my childhood love and diligent collecting of Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. I knew Dozois had passed away and the series had ended with him, but had anybody picked up the baton and started something similar? Hey, somebody had, and R.F. Kuang had guest-edited the most recent edition!

It was a bit of a disappointment. Lots of amateurish work, lots of pieces that strain the definition of “short fiction” (and mostly not in fun, experimental ways), lots of shallow treatment of hot-button topics. There are some winners, though; Isabel Kim’s “Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist” is the absolute hands-down standout. Alix Harrow’s formally (if not thematically) inventive “The Six Deaths of the Saint,” Chris Willrich’s cute Star Trek satire “The Odyssey Problem,” and Maria Dong’s strange, unsettling “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” are also good.

Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Gao Wenqian)

Imagine how nonplussed everybody in my life was when I spent a couple weeks after finishing this being like, “Okay, I know you already think Mao was bad, but what if I told you he was even worse?!” Zhou’s biographer intended this as a corrective to decades of official hagiography, showing us that the man was, after all, only human, and flawed like all of us. He was human, of course, and he was flawed, but I’m now convinced he was one of the most extraordinary human beings of his time, and very much worthy of praise (if not sainthood).

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World (Arthur Herman)

You ever read something that covers a bunch of subject matter you don’t know very well, and then gets to a subject you do know quite well, hundreds of pages in, and you realize, wow, this author knows less about this stuff than I do, and he’s made a bunch of elementary mistakes, and what if the whole book has been like this and I just didn’t know? Yeah. Also, the titular thesis is a bit fashy (in spite of Herman’s protests-too-much efforts to distance himself from the far right) and the title itself gets laboriously worked into the text about nine hundred times, which is just annoying.

System Collapse (Martha Wells)

All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!

Prophet Song (Paul Lynch)

Gorgeous, harrowing, haunting. Exemplary evidence for the argument that the novel is a powerful, perhaps unique medium for generating true empathy, for conjuring up other lives, other people, letting you walk in their shoes, experience their fears and sorrows, and bring something of them back to your own life—a memory, a feeling, some moral clarity and guidance, a light in the dark. Right up there with Kairos. The best books I’ve read all year.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel

I read this immediately after Prophet Song, which was a tough act to follow. Had I jumped into it after, say, Murderbot, would the prose have seemed so pedestrian, the characters so thinly developed and undifferentiated, the setting such a lazy pastiche of scenes from filmic zombie apocalypses? Maybe, maybe not. But I still don’t think I’d have loved it. This is very much a conservative, even reactionary, perspective on civilization and crisis—makes the case that some fragile membrane (a thin blue line, one might say) is all that protects us from savage violence, from people turning feral, from the whole human species unlearning centuries of science and engineering. Wrong! All wrong! People aren't feral monsters in waiting. Pandemics don’t work this way (as we all know now thanks to COVID). And you can make penicillin in your kitchen!

Signs of Life, Thoughts on Greatness

 

It’s been a busy summer for me: three far-flung weddings on three different continents, two of which we spun into short vacations; a long dog-sitting stint at my sister’s place; and a move, in the midst of all that, to a new apartment, complete with various snafus getting the internet set up. We still haven’t fully unpacked, and I still haven’t set up my desktop computer. But I’m mostly settled in, and I’ve got my decrepit 12-year-old MacBook Pro up and running—it’s time to get back on the blogging horse!

* * *

In my absence from Online, I missed getting to comment on either ESPN’s “Top Athletes of the 21st Century” or the NYT’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” This probably should have been an opportunity for me to reflect on the fact that I don’t have to write about every piece of engagement-bait nonsense barfed up by our floundering media giants, and yet here we are.

Being lazy engagement bait, both lists are stupid on their faces—let’s get that out of the way first. Trying to rank athletes is something of a fool’s errand even within one sport, even a sport like baseball (my lifelong sporting obsession) that’s absolutely drowning in data. How do you compare pitchers to hitters? How do you compare guys who played pre-integration to those playing today? Even within a much shorter time span, can you compare the speed-crazy 1980s to the power-mad steroid era at the turn of the century? Now try to compare baseball players to basketball players. All the stats go out the window; we’re left with awards and accomplishments—championships, trophies, All-Star selections. Now compare them to water polo players and gymnasts. There are almost no points of connection. It’s an exercise in absurdity.

The absurd exercise managed to get even more absurd, albeit also more interesting, in ESPN’s hands, because—despite supposedly having polled their affiliates all over the world—they came up with an improbably U.S.-centric list, with 56 of the selections being American-born (and plenty of the remainder having attained their fame, or at least the greatest measure thereof, here). Unsurprisingly, the list, especially the top half, is very light on soccer players, and there’s almost no representation of sports that are neither popular here nor dominated by our athletes at the Olympics (one solitary cricketer, for instance, down at the very bottom). Basketball is overrepresented, in keeping with ESPN’s contractually dictated biases. But it’s the inclusion of Olympians that’s particularly perplexing, when you get down to trying to understand what the editors mean by “the top athletes,” “the greatest athletes of the 21st century,” or “the best athletes of the 21st century” (they use these terms interchangeably).

The single greatest athlete of the 21st century? Michael Phelps, apparently. Which, sure, the guy was amazing…in an athletic niche that almost nobody pays attention to, three years out of four. Maybe that's enough, though; if you’re indisputably the best ever in your sport, no matter how marginal that sport might be, you’re the greatest, right? Except that if Olympic dominance like Phelps’s is good enough for the #1 position, surely all-time great cross-country skier Marit Bjorgen and all-time great speed skater Ireen Wüst are in the top five, or at least the top ten, right? Nope—they’re not on the list at all. Are there any marathoners, any distance runners at all, any representation of Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance in those highly visible sports—ones in which far more regular people participate as amateur competitors than in things like gymnastics, ice hockey, auto racing, American football, or even, for all its recreational popularity, swimming? No, of course not. Americans don’t know them.

* * *

In the literary world, or at least one tiny-but-influential corner thereof, a bunch of very different people approached a similar question about a completely different subject and botched it for similar reasons. The best books of the 21st century, as selected by a bunch of NYT contributors, are even more preposterously U.S.-centric than ESPN’s list of great athletes. They chose 87 books by Americans! Entire continents went unrepresented, or almost entirely unrepresented (Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was the only selection by an Asian author who lives and works in Asia). To the very limited extent that the contributors engage with Asia or Africa, it’s almost all through the eyes of Americans and a few Europeans (Min Jin Lee, Katherine Boo, Marjane Satrapi, Mohsin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Hisham Matar). All of these authors were born in Africa or Asia or have close family connections there, so it’s not like this is literary tourism or colonialism, but it is still a degree of remove from the reality of life in other countries, in other cultures—an incuriosity about the world except as communicated by the same little coterie of English-speaking MFA graduates who write all our novels, our short stories, our essays, and, of course, our book reviews.

The American literary ecosystem, dominated by a few institutions like the Times, is a small, closed system. A group of authors who are the product of the same class, the same cities, the same schools, all reviewing each other’s work—no surprise that nothing new enters the system, and that the criticism of what does get covered is invariably toothless. Book clubs and attentive individual readers pick up the books covered (and nearly always recommended) by the Times, they sell (modestly, but well enough), and the cycle continues.

It’s striking that when the Times published an alternative list of reader selections for the 100 best, 39 books were shared between the two lists. (When this second one dropped, I was online enough to peck out some salty Reddit comments on my phone.) Many of the other 61 show up as runner-up recommendations in the original list, too; there’s enormous overlap between the lists, which would be surprising in light of older stereotypical expectations of authors’ reading preferences (obscure, thorny, experimental) and those of bourgeois newspaper subscribers (middlebrow, unchallenging, conventional). Times change, I guess. Even the literati are now firmly middlebrow, inward-looking, and narrow-minded.

It’s not news that American readers are parochial; for all our imperial ambitions, we’re a famously parochial people. We don’t follow the news of the world except when our military is (or might be) involved and we know perilously little about other cultures, about geography, about the history of the rest of the world. We rarely read anything in translation, and what little we do is almost always European—mostly 19th-century classics, the occasional more recent Nobel winner. We don’t trust ourselves to recognize greatness on our own, I guess.

* * *

What is greatness, anyway? As presented by ESPN and the NYT, it’s somewhere near the intersection of “what we know and like” and “what’s marketable.” The “top athletes,” or “top books,” sure, I’ll buy that as a list of who’s got the biggest sponsorship deals, the most Instagram followers, the most sales, the most Google searches. And the “best,” if it can’t be quantified by sabermetric number-crunching, might as well be purely subjective. But the greatest?

Maybe a quarter-century is just too short of a window for evaluating these things. When we think about the literary canon, and even when we think about the great athletes of the past, we tend to think about legacies, about influence—the first to do it, the inventors, the bar-setters, the ones who invented styles, revolutionized genres, spawned a thousand imitators. Things can be great without being good; they can be great without deserving moral approbation.

What’s the greatest TTRPG of all time? (See, I managed to find my way home eventually!) It’s D&D, obviously. It doesn’t have to be the best, it doesn’t have to be your favorite, and it doesn’t have to be unproblematic. Greatness is objective, undeniable, beyond all that.

How to Name Things: A Case Against Conlangs

I've been thinking about constructed languages a bunch since reading Manvir Singh's excellent New Yorker piece about Dune and conlangs; I rewatched Dune: Part Two over the weekend, too. I had thoughts. And I'm always thinking about worldbuilding and names, always scribbling notes for my current Stars Without Number campaign, my Lore24 project, my myriad half-baked fantasy settings, etc. Might as well try to make all this thinking useful to somebody else!

* * *

I see four major approaches to naming fictional people, places, and things:

1. Use real names. This is not only (usually) the easiest approach, it's a necessary one for certain genres. If you're writing realistic fiction set in the present day, you need contemporary names. Same with any genre that uses the real world as a foundation; most characters in an urban fantasy story, for instance, will probably have contemporary real-world names. Near-future science fiction will use all, or almost all, real names for its human characters; you just need to pay attention to demographics a bit (more than a third of Earth's population is either Chinese or Indian—don't skimp on Chinese and Indian surnames without good reason).
   
   On that note, using real names does involve research sometimes. If you're writing historical fiction, you need to make sure your names are appropriate to the period and culture you're representing. But there's never a time real names should be off-limits. Far into the future, it's reasonable to have contemporary names, particularly heritable surnames, keep appearing. Even in secondary-world fiction, real names sometimes work well (look at Disco Elysium).
   
   
2. Derive new names from existing names or from other words. Change some letters. Chop a few names apart and scramble the syllables. Grab common nouns from foreign languages. Make names out of existing words that aren't proper nouns, or move proper nouns across categories (use a company's name for a person's last name, or a person's first name for a country).
   
   Some people look down on this approach, but it has strong precedents. George R. R. Martin does this a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire: Eddard, Tyrion, Myrcella, Roose. George Lucas did it in Star Wars, too: Greedo, Wedge Antilles, Skywalker, Sidious. Your choices can be informed by a knowledge of linguistics and history, à la Martin, or they can be totally arbitrary, à la Lucas. Sure, Lucas came up with some duds, but he hit on some real winners too. Darth Vader! Han Solo!
   
   
3. Give names in plain English (or whatever language you're writing in) and explain that they're literal translations from a source language that you either never describe or perhaps relegate, in the form of a few instructive examples, to a footnote or an appendix.
   
   
4. Create a whole de novo conlang and derive names from that. Better yet, create multiple conlangs and then imagine an entire fictional history involving various fictional cultures. Share loanwords among your languages. Chart the progression of your fictional languages through vowel shifts and state-mandated standardizations. Simulate everything!
   
   Many people are drawn to this approach because it's an enjoyable challenge in and of itself. (That was Tolkien's motivation, famously: “The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”) But many others go down this path because it seems like the most “realistic” or “authentic” way to generate names. Some think of it as the sine qua non of good worldbuilding.
   
   (We might say that there's a fifth approach, which is “make it up de novo, but in an unsystematic way,” but I think that you can pretty much always sort those into #2, if they really are unsystematic, or #4 otherwise: Either they're trying, if only unconsciously, to imitate some existing word or word structure, or they're making such an effort not to resemble anything that already exists that they're essentially a conlang, if perhaps a rather shoddy one.)

But enough taxonomy. What I want to do here is stick up for the non-conlang approaches. They have a lot to recommend them, starting with the fact that whereas your audience has to learn every single syllable of any conlang you show them, they already have a world of associations with existing words—even single syllables resonate with them. Maul? Sidious? Those are bad guys. Solo? He's a cool lone wolf. Skywalker? Probably a great pilot. Voldemort? You only need to know the last syllable: His name means death. These examples are all at the unsubtle end of the spectrum, but you know what? They work.

Examples from ASOIAF or Disco Elysium are a bit less literal, but still take advantage of associations and resonances with the familiar. Eddard Stark? Basically Edward Strong. Regal. Old and very English, which in fantasy usually means “us,” the familiar. Evrart Claire? First name is a slight twist on Evrard. Second means clear or understandable, which is almost certainly going to be ironic. Both are extremely French, which, at this point in the game, we've established means “here,” the familiar. One of us. And your audience doesn't actually need to know any of the trivia or etymology to just know, to have a gut feeling about the name. It resonates.

The more familiar a name is, the more your audience will identify with it. If you have people and places in your story who go by familiar names, or whose names are given as translations into common English, the audience will recognize them as “us.” Those with unfamiliar names, especially ones that feature unusual orthography and are difficult to pronounce, the audience will “other,” identifying them as…well, “them.” You should bear this in mind just as a gut check when naming stuff (anything with glottal-stop apostrophes in it is going to seem totally foreign to most English-speaking audiences, something I wish more fantasy writers understood), but you can also put it to work for you more purposefully. You can give your audience a lot of information about a person or place with just a couple syllables, and with a whole network of associations from multiple names, you can quickly sketch out an elaborate cultural geography.

Tolkien gives us a textbook example of how to do this. The Mannish languages of Middle-Earth (i.e., those spoken in the Shire, in the Dale, in Rohan, etc.) have, as per #3 above, a “real” form (which he did not fully elaborate the way he did with Quenya and Sindarin, although he did give some examples), but they are “translated” into real-world languages. Westron, which is the language of our heroes the hobbits, is represented as modern English. Places like Rivendell, Brandywine, and Bag End, as well as people like Peregrin (or Pippin) and Merry, have “real” Westron names, but they are written as English in the stories. We know what “riven” means, we know what a “dell” is, we know “brandy,” “wine,” “peregrine,” and so forth. The Shire is familiar. It's home (and Rivendell is a safe, comfortable home away from home). The hobbits are “us.”

The farther we go from the Shire, the more foreign things become. Other Mannish languages are rendered as other Germanic languages: Rohanese (aka Rohirric) is Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) and the language of the Dale is Old Norse. These are languages closely related to modern English, but not intelligible to English speakers. This tells us that these people are foreign to the hobbits, but with a fairly close cultural connection. The quasi-Welsh language of the grey elves suggests people more foreign than the Rohirrim, but still culturally connected to the Shire, whereas the quasi-Hebrew language of the dwarves and the quasi-Finnish language of the high elves are almost completely alien (English is distantly related to Welsh, but totally unrelated to Hebrew or Finnish—although of course Hebrew does suggest a spiritual connection, if not a direct cultural one; the dwarves may not be “us,” but they are like us). Tolkien uses our familiarity with real-world languages to establish a legible cultural geography. We don't need to be told that the high elves are more exotic to the hobbits than the grey elves are, and the grey elves in turn more exotic than the Rohirrim. We can just see it in the names.

Other fantasy and science fiction greats have used the same trick and similar ones. In Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, people's “use names,” though ostensibly belonging to the fictional Hardic language, are almost always given as plain English words, often those of animals or trees: Sparrowhawk, Otter, Dragonfly, Alder, Beech, Gamble. (So are some place names, like Ten Alders and Easthill.) True names, magic spells, and other words in the Old Speech (the language of dragons and wizards) come from a conlang. This others them, sharply separating them from use names and giving them an air of mystery. If Le Guin had come up with an entire Hardic conlang and used it for all the use names and common place names, the distinction would have been lost. To the reader, all the words would seem equally foreign.

Le Guin also used language associations to subvert readers' racial expectations. Her Archipelagan protagonists are dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-skinned, quite unlike the typical protagonists of young-adult literature in the 1960s and 70s. The Kargs, on the other hand, are pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and often fair-haired—much more akin to the assumed default in midcentury America. But the Archipelagans' Hardic speech is represented as English, whereas Kargish is represented by fictional words with a distinctly non-English phonology and orthography. Language helps a white reader see the Kargs as foreign barbarians and the Archipelagans as “us,” even if that reader is unaccustomed to identifying with nonwhite people.

Gene Wolfe, in The Book of the New Sun, also uses the translation conceit, explaining that his tale of the far future involves many words that don't exist yet in our time. To “translate” them, he describes or names many people and things with real but obscure or archaic words: Ascians, hipparchs, nenuphars, Pelerines. As with Le Guin's Old Speech, this lends them an air of mystery, albeit one that in this case communicates not an exotic origin but an ancient, forgotten one, appropriate for a setting in which there's literally nothing new under the sun, even if nobody can remember much of what is past.

Conversely, if you create everything from scratch, you lose all of the cultural and linguistic associations that real (or real-ish) words offer. This definitely has its merits in certain cases. When you want to create extraterrestrials or interdimensional demons that are genuinely alien, beings for which your audience has no frame of reference whatsoever, it's the only way to go—if you want those ETs or demons to be named in their own language.

But you don't actually need to do that. It might not even be plausible! If your totally alien ETs aren't humanoids, what are the odds their words can even be pronounced by human tongues? You can call them by exonyms derived from human language, as with many classic SF aliens: arachnids, xenomorphs, prawns, the Thing, Jean Jacket, good old Martians. Before you drive yourself crazy trying to whip up a whole world's worth of realistic conlangs, consider that even after Tolkien did just that, he still walked things back for his stories and relied on English and other real-world languages for their associations and resonances.

Bookpost #1

Charles Vess's cover art for the Earthsea omnibus

 

Here's what I've read so far in 2024:

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Katja Hoyer)

Incomplete but fascinating and much-needed. It has caused controversy in Germany because Germany remains deeply in the thrall of the far right and is forever trying to draw a false equivalence between the Nazi era and the communist era; many Germans believe that the one was no worse than the other, and thus that even faint and qualified praise of the German Democratic Republic is tantamount to Holocaust denial. (Never mind that the German right's tireless effort to memorialize “the forgotten victims of Soviet tyranny” and their whining whenever the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazi era are discussed without the crimes of the GDR placed alongside them represent a soft form of Holocaust denial. Even the most exaggerated, partisan estimates of the GDR's death toll put it at a few thousand, while neutral estimates are in the high hundreds. The Nazis killed twelve million or more.) Was the GDR perfect, or even good? No. It was truly undemocratic, and the Stasi were a decades-long waking nightmare. But it's incredibly depressing to see what the state accomplished in terms of women's rights in particular and how far even the most progressive corners of the developed world are from achieving the same, more than 40 years on. Hard to even see it as a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater—more like drowning the baby in the tub.

Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park)

Enthralling. The sort of book that fills me with envy and admiration: How did you make something this big, this ambitious, and this complex work this well?

Shark Heart (Emily Habeck)

In this novel, people sometimes turn into animals. This seems to be a metaphor for mental illness, degenerative illness, cancer, or some combination of those things; it's not very consistent. The characters treat the transformations not as metaphor but as long-established scientific fact, and yet the world they live in is just our world, with no accommodations for the transformed or any decent idea of what to do with them. If I were mean-spirited, I'd make a big fuss online about how this book's message is essentially “Disabled people should be cast into the wilderness to die or make their own society.” I'm not, and I don't think the author intended that kind of harm, but it's hard to read it any other way. Even apart from the simultaneous ugliness and unseriousness of the central conceit, there's not much to like here: one-dimensional characters, a raft of annoying stylistic gimmicks, Rupi Kaur platitudes.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)

Charming, delightfully French, uncomfortably misanthropic, politically dodgy, ultimately let down by a hackneyed ending.

The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Christopher Beckwith)

Spends too much time and energy on its weakest evidence (make-believe linguistics) and most far-fetched claims (including the titular one, that there was a unified Scythian Empire stretching from Eastern Europe to Northern China). Some pretty cool and entirely plausible ideas about early Iranian history, though. Fun fodder for fantasy and alternate-history worldbuilding.

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Every few years, I reread something by Austen and am shocked all over again at what a catty bitch she was. This one lays on the classism and fatphobia pretty thick and is also halfway to being a Royal Navy recruitment pamphlet. Still hilarious and 100% charming, of course.

Counterweight (Djuna)

Great big heaps of dry exposition interspersed with frenetic, sometimes disjointed action, and yet pretty enjoyable. Characters don't get a lot of room to breathe and grow but are nevertheless well drawn and distinct. Packed with cool cyberpunk ideas and images. Better than the sum of its parts.

Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck)

If this doesn't end up being the best book I read in 2024, I will eat my hat (and praise the heavens for a year of superlative reading). Astounding. Heartbreaking. Puts everything else I've read in recent months in its shadow. It's rare to read a personal, probably autobiographical narrative this moving, and it's rare to read political allegory this compelling, but to unite the two so seamlessly, so that each operates perfectly without in any way interfering with or diminishing the other, is incredible. I read it in English translation and am looking forward to muddling my way through it again in German.

Berlin (Bea Setton)

One of those books that you think you're not really enjoying until you finish it, at which point you find that it sticks with you and that, well, yeah, you didn't enjoy it, but the ways in which it made you uncomfortable or exasperated or angry were strengths, not weaknesses.

The Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell)

A novel about a bunch of East India Company colonists starving, dying of cholera, and massacring nameless hundreds or thousands of Indians has no right to be this funny. Female characters are a bit thin, but some of the men are astonishingly fully realized. As profound and moving as it is hilarious.

The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

Is it nakedly emotionally manipulative? Yes. Did I cry? Also yes.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (Uché Blackstock)

I would have organized it differently, putting more of the hard facts of unequal treatment and outcomes for Black Americans front and center and then easing into the memoir elements…but I might not be the primary audience, working where I do and knowing what I do (although I am certainly part of the explicitly defined target audience, in more than one category). The facts remain harrowing, and although I knew a good deal about the subject already, I learned a good deal more.

The Laughter (Sonora Jha)

More than most books these days, it's clear that this one got literally no attention from any editor whatsoever. Unbearably sloppy, and I almost gave up in the first 20 or 30 pages. (And then again on page 74, where I encountered the single worst sentence I've read in print in years: “They have been to my home twice before in the past two days since the incident.”) By page 250, I was glad I hadn't—the narrator is a bit of a sock puppet, but some of the secondary characters are very well drawn and the themes are interesting—but by the end, I'd changed my mind again. The narrative's straining to remain believable and the narrator's straining to remain a coherent, plausible human being finally give out under the weight of some thuddingly didactic ripped-from-the-headlines twists. The author's ambition far exceeds her grasp here; I admire her chutzpah, but if you want to create a narrator in the mold of Humbert Humbert—and you make the comparison yourself, in the text!—your prose had better be flawless. I don't even like Nabokov (a self-obsessed, misanthropic, arch-misogynist reactionary who never had anything interesting to say), but credit where it's due: He was one of the greatest prose stylists we've ever had. Come for the king, better not miss, etc.

Tales from Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)

Tales from the GOAT. Fantasy really doesn't get any better than this. “The Bones of the Earth” is particularly beautiful.

 

Unsavory Patterns in Contemporary Science Fiction

It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me

 

1.

We lay our scene in an all-powerful empire of the far future. (We will soon understand that the empire, founded on and sustained by slavery, torture, mass murder, and stranger, even more heinous crimes, is irredeemably evil.) A longtime soldier of the empire embarks on a journey that will bring her into contact with a quasi-human outsider and various other plucky misfits, and their efforts merely to survive will eventually snowball, over the course of a trilogy of novels, into a plot to overthrow the empire.

Is it N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy? Is it Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire? Is it Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch? That's right: It's all three. (Well, okay, in the latter case, it's the quasi-human outsider who's the main character and who takes the disillusioned human soldier under her wing, but close enough.)

I liked all of these series, to be clear, enough to have read all nine books. There's a lot to enjoy in them. But I didn't love them. Each has its particular minor flaws, but the one flaw I can't get past in any of them is the one they all share: that overarching plot, which makes two changes (one trivial, one quite ugly) to a hoary old cliché.

The foundation is Star Wars, a trad hero's-journey tale that's been recapitulated a zillion times and remains part of the bedrock of young-adult science fiction and fantasy. (The Hunger Games and Red Rising are two popular YA series that follow this formula closely; there are myriad others I'm less familiar with.) Distancing the work from its YA cousins, the second of the two changes makes the conclusion more ambiguous. Instead of a tidy victory for the rebels, replacing the evil empire with its good twin, we get a state of uncertainty: civil war in Lee, civil war interrupted by uneasy peace in Leckie, and a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa in Jemisin.

The bigger change appears right at the start: The authors swap out their protagonist. Instead of an innocent young person from the imperial periphery, we follow a soldier who has been a more-or-less loyal servant of the empire for much of her life.

Now, all three authors are American. (Yes, the author is still dead, but context matters. All three series are American.) All three series debuted during the second Obama administration, when the American far right was ascendant; Lee and Jemisin concluded their trilogies under Trump, when an outright fascist future for the country suddenly seemed possible. All three authors are liberals, and all three bring a liberal lens to their work. Lee in particular concerns himself with the fate of liberal democracy, imagining it to be a forbidden idea in the distant, hyper-fascist future, and society's last and best hope for reform. Leckie doesn't bring democracy to the Radch, but does imagine liberal reforms: pacifism, an end to body-snatching technoslavery, etc. Jemisin's entire world is an implicit critique of extractive capitalism and indifference to environmental concerns.

Here's why that context matters, and why the change in protagonist is significant: Each book asks us to identify with a servant of empire, somebody spiritually if not literally situated in the imperial core, somebody deeply implicated (regardless of what misgivings they have) in the empire's crimes. Rather than an innocent victim from the periphery (a farm boy, a miner), we now have a protagonist who is at best a victim turned perpetrator. If we are Americans, and college-educated Americans at that—which a large, perhaps predominant part of the readership are, yours truly included—this act of identification isn't much of a stretch. We do live in a vast, cruel empire founded on slavery and genocide and sustained by brutal warfare, economic terrorism, and the despoilment of the planet. We are deeply implicated in the empire's crimes. The fantasy of tearing down the empire, or a corner of the empire, and beginning to build a better world is a powerful one.

Unfortunately, these stories have no idea what a better world than ours looks like; they can only imagine a worse one. In each far-future setting, the steps the protagonists take toward a nebulously better world are merely steps back toward 21st-century American liberalism. An end to technoslavery and ritual torture, an end to wars of blatant territorial expansion, the restoration of representative democracy, an end to wildly irresponsible geoengineering. Not only do they offer us nothing we don't, in principle, already have, but the means by which they imagine achieving this non-progress are inaccessible, impractical, or unacceptable for us: personal access to the elite of society and the liberal application of instrumental violence.

Few of us are acquainted with senators (or anyone of consequence). And sure, violence is fun in stories (make-believe violence is this blog's bread and butter, in fact), and violence sometimes gets things done in real life, too—I'm not a proponent of total nonviolence as a political strategy—but, at this juncture in American history, it can accomplish little more than gratifying and fattening the security apparatus and its far-right paramilitary adjuncts.

The analogy from our reality to a more luridly, baroquely evil one inadvertently permits us, even encourages us, to become complacent about conditions in our own society. If we lived in this world, if things were this bad, we would, like our plucky heroes, stand up and fight. But it's not that bad, so we don't have to. (Yet. Vote Blue!) Sure, we've got concentration camps at the border and a million people imprisoned without trial and we're aiding and abetting a couple of genocides overseas, but at least we're not literally torturing children in perpetuity to power our magical technology. (Which reminds me: Do we have time to delve into this atrocity? Alas, we do not. Some other time.)

These stories offer no solutions to our problems and no tools more subtle than a bomb. Instead, they lull us into quietism, assuring us that hey, things could always be a whole lot worse.

 

2.

This one's so ubiquitous that it features, incidentally, in two of the three trilogies discussed above (Lee and Leckie), and so boring that I don't have much to say about it. Everybody's thinking about “artificial intelligence” these days, yet nobody can imagine anything other than a humanoid robot. It's robots all the way down. Occasionally scary killer robots (Ex Machina, M3GAN) but usually loveable, just-like-us robots whom society unfairly discriminates against but our heroes recognize as equals (the aforementioned novels, Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, The Creator—one of the worst works of science fiction I've ever encountered—Chappie, the list goes on).

We still have I, Robot. We have Blade Runner. We have Data from Star Trek. We have Neuromancer, for God's sake, which did more interesting things with AI four decades ago than anybody seems capable of today. We don't need a thousand new variations on robots, replicants, or androids, especially if they have absolutely nothing interesting to say and mostly serve as confusing, hamfisted metaphors for human prejudice. We don't need more robotic serial killers, either. (And we sure as shit don't need more Skynets.)

Everybody please just shut up about AI until we have something more interesting to say than “it's scary” or “we should be nice to it.” Thanks!

2023: Year of Culture

La Mer at the Boston Ballet

 

The Books I Most Enjoyed in 2023 (Only One of Which Was Actually Published That Year)

• A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968 onward)

  I'm rereading my way through the big, beautiful 2018 omnibus edition. I originally read Tombs of Atuan first, when I was eleven, having found it on the little bookshelf in my sixth-grade classroom. It's not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life; it's been with me ever since, and it's still my favorite of these four. The others are richer than they were, though, coming back to them for the first time in a long time (I reread them a couple times as a teenager, and maybe in my early twenties, but it had been a good fifteen years at least). I appreciate the Taoist influence, especially in The Farthest Shore, a lot more than I did when I was younger.
  

• The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975)

  Anybody Samuel Delaney, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Gene Wolfe all counted in the inner circle of their most important and talented peers must be worth reading, even if she is mostly out of print now, right? No big twist here: Yes. She was brilliant. Bitter, hilarious, wildly creative. (And out of print no longer; the Library of America just published her collected works.)
  

• Teaching a Stone to Talk (Annie Dillard, 1982)

  Wonderful little essay collection. It was one of the first things I read in 2023, and “An Expedition to the Pole” and “Aces and Eights” in particular stuck with me all year.
  

• The Idiot (Elif Batuman, 2017)

  It's unsettling how effectively she conjures up the foggy, mercurial emotional and intellectual world of a teenager, the simultaneous fragility and stubbornness, the know-it-all idiocy.

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk, translated 2018)

  Uproarious, defiant, righteous, truly unique. Janina is an all-time great unreliable narrator. Probably the best thing I read all year.
  

• The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti (Meryle Secrest, 2019)

  Did the CIA assassinate Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou to prevent Olivetti from leapfrogging IBM and becoming the world’s most important computer company, thwart the sale of advanced technology to China, and let General Electric buy the now-distressed company for a song? Yes. They totally did.
  

• The Employees (Olga Ravn, trans. 2020)

  Foreign, in multiple senses, science fiction that follows almost none of the familiar rules of the genre. Kind of an anti–Blade Runner, setting humans and replicants alongside each other and then estranging the former rather than humanizing the latter.
  

• Matrix (Lauren Groff, 2021)

  Not-quite-historical fiction that builds an awesomely fully realized little corner of medieval Europe. Transportive, right from the first sentence.
  

• Mona (Pola Oloixarac, trans. 2021)

  Seems a witty, funny, dirty, and rather gentle satire of academia and the literary world but for the occasional surreal vision or half-remembered hint of something much more disturbing. The weirdness accelerates so smoothly and swiftly that, even though you can sort of see it coming, the climax hits you like a truck.
  

• A Man of Two Faces (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2023)

  Part memoir, part polemic, part history, part eulogy. Beautifully written.

The Book I Got Angriest About in 2023

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin, 2022)

  I'm torn, because I don't have any serious ill will toward the author (a little scolding will, maybe) and I think it's very easy to be negative (and have fun being catty about it) and much harder to, you know, write a whole fucking novel and send it out into the world to be ripped apart by jerks like me. My general policy is (or at least I know it should be) “If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all.”
  
  However, I have a lot to say about this one, most of which is negative and some of which actually feels important. Maybe I'll do a big post on it later and then delete the whole thing if this blog ever attains any kind of significant readership? For now I will say that although this novel is not alone among contemporary media in portraying the 1990s as a lost golden age, and it's not even alone in scrubbing all the rough edges off that benighted decade, the way it belatedly introduces to its plot racism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other form of bigotry it has bizarrely elided for hundreds of pages is uniquely dishonest and disturbing.

 

My Personal 2024 Oscars

• Best Picture: Past Lives

• Best Actor: Natalie Portman in May December

• Best Animated Feature: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

• Most Tasteless (Complimentary): Bottoms

• Best Frankenstein Retelling: Birth/Rebirth

• Best Scream Meets Sci-Fi Comedy Classic Mashup: Totally Killer

• Special Achievement in Odious Protagonists: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Special Achievement in ACAB: Only the Good Survive

• Biggest Success in Spite of Itself: Oppenheimer

• Best Cannibal and Best Mukbang: Cannibal Mukbang
  

Notable Older Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

• The Color of Pomegranates

  I'm going to film a fifteen-hour-long adaptation of The Book of the New Sun in exactly this style.
  

• Picnic at Hanging Rock

  Indelible. I want to turn this into a TTRPG setting, somehow.
  

• Midnight Cowboy

  Incredibly fresh and powerful, despite have been referenced, imitated, homaged, and memed a thousand times over.
  

• The Handmaiden

  It's Picnic at Hanging Rock, but Korean. I will not be taking questions at this time.
  

• Videodrome

  With each passing news cycle, the New Flesh looks more and more appealing.

 

My Favorite Dumb Little Letterboxd Reviews I Wrote in 2023

• Abstract Expressionism Comedy Hour

• Somebody Studied Too Much Critical Theory

• An Actual Attempt to Do Film Criticism

 

My Favorite Series of Reviews I Found on Letterboxd in 2023

• This absolute queen watched Carol twenty-two times in a three-year period.

 

Most Embarrassing “Why Haven't I Been Listening to This for Years?” Musical Discovery

• Du Blonde

 

Best Unexpected Record Release by a Long-Beloved Artist

• Formentera II (Metric)

 

Best Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Big New England Bias)

• Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (MASS MoCA)

 

Best Not-Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Even More Powerful New England Bias)

• Fashioned by Sargent (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

 

Ballet Bummer of the Year 2023

• La Mer (part of the "Our Journey" program at the Boston Ballet)

  Again, I don't want to be a jerk about it. Parts were cool, some great images (the siren rock, the light swinging through the depths), some lovely performances. My gripe is a very big, very broad one, and this dance performance just happened to exemplify it: The audience at the Boston Ballet, in the year of our Lord 2023, does not need to be convinced that global warming is happening, or that it's bad. Or that the oceans are in danger. Or that we need to change our relationship with Mother Earth. If there are people who still need to be convinced of these things, they're probably not going to the ballet, and they're probably not in Boston, and they're almost certainly not going to the ballet in Boston.
  
  What Boston Ballet-goers need is to be convinced that they are still culpable. That sorting their recycling and composting their food waste and driving their Prius and going to see eco-conscious Art doesn't absolve them of anything. That the same system that affords them wealth enough to go to the ballet and cultural instruction enough to appreciate it is the very thing killing the planet, poisoning the oceans, and blocking any effort to change our society or our values in a meaningful, enduring way. That change might discomfit them, but is nonetheless necessary. That they need to act, not just spectate and consume.